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An Interview with Alice Kessler-Harris

This interview, first published in "Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 24, no. 2 (Winter 2019)" details historian Alice Kessler-Harris's upbringing as a child of World War II refugees and how she first became interested in her Jewish heritage and the topic of gender studies.

While researching her dissertation, Kessler-Harris discovered the fiction of Anzia Yezierska, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant writer who found great acclaim in the 1920s but whose work had fallen into obscurity. Convinced Yezierska’s work was important historically but also resonant for contemporary audiences, Kessler-Harris devoted herself to finding a new publisher in the 1970s and thus introduced hundreds of thousands of new readers to Yezierska’s work, now a staple of both academic courses and also English Language Learners courses. In 2016, Kessler-Harris worked with Columbia University and the New York Historical Society to have her first book, Women Have Always Worked, become the basis of a massive open online course (MOOC).

In addition to her impressive list of publications, Kessler-Harris is known as a generous mentor and a leader in the historical profession. As a faculty member at Rutgers and at Columbia, Kessler-Harris took an active role in educating graduate students and in supporting them as they pursued a variety of career paths. Among her many professional activities, Kessler-Harris pushed for greater inclusion within the historical profession by working to establish the Coordinating Council of Women in the Historical Profession (CCWHP) and serving as chair of the American Historical Association’s Committee on the Status of Women. She has also served as president of the American Studies Association (1992–93), the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA, 2008–10), and the Organization of American Historians (2011–12).

The editors of Jewish Social Studies wanted to interview Kessler-Harris as someone who did influential work on Jewish women and Jewish workers early in her career, but did not choose to focus on Jews as her primary subject. We thought it would be interesting and valuable to hear her thoughts about Jewish history as a field and how her own experiences led her to an early interest in Jews but also led in other directions.

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